Wikipedia marked its 25th anniversary by unveiling new business deals with artificial intelligence companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France’s Mistral AI.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, said the agreements would let AI companies access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” but it did not provide financial or other details.
The announcement landed as concerns have risen around how generative AI systems are trained and supplied with content scraped from the web, including from Wikipedia’s repository of free knowledge. Wikipedia has faced pressure to respond to the question of who pays for the use of that content and the strain it can place on the site’s infrastructure.
Speaking to The Associated Press, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI models training on Wikipedia data, describing it as “human curated.” Wales said, “I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated,” adding he “wouldn’t really want to use an AI that’s trained only on X,” referring to Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies rather than block them. He told AP, “you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us,” arguing that AI developers should contribute to what Wikipedia said it bears from providing access and handling demand.
The Wikimedia Foundation has previously pressed for payment for access through its enterprise platform. In a statement summarized by AP, it said human traffic had fallen 8% and that visits from bots—sometimes disguised to evade detection—were heavily taxing its servers as they scraped large amounts of content to feed AI large language models.
Wikimedia also described the broader shift in how people search and read online, with search-engine AI overviews and chatbots summarizing information rather than sending users to websites by listing links. AP said Wikipedia is among the most visited sites, describing it as the ninth most visited on the internet, with more than 65 million articles in 300 languages edited by some 250,000 volunteers.
Maryana Iskander, the Wikimedia Foundation’s chief executive, said the pressure over cost and infrastructure is part of why the foundation has sought deals. In AP’s report from Johannesburg, she said, “But our infrastructure is not free,” and described the cost of maintaining servers and other infrastructure used by people and tech companies “to draw data from Wikipedia.”
Iskander said the foundation’s funding largely comes from individual donors, with AP reporting that the bulk of support comes from 8 million donors. Wales said the donations are not meant to subsidize large AI companies, telling AP that donors are “saying, ‘You know what, actually you can’t just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.’”
Wales also discussed ways AI might help Wikipedia editors rather than replace them, saying AI is not good enough to write entries from scratch. He said it could be used to update dead links by scanning surrounding text and then searching online for other sources, and he suggested AI could improve search by shifting from keyword lookup toward a chatbot experience that quotes directly from Wikipedia and points to the relevant paragraph.
Wikipedia has also drawn criticism from political figures on the right, with lawmakers in the U.S. Congress investigating alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that they say could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view. Wales told AP he does not consider Musk’s AI rival Grokipedia a “real threat,” and he said, “Large language models aren’t good enough to write really quality reference material,” adding that much of it can be “regurgitated Wikipedia.”
When asked about his relationship with Musk, Wales told AP he should probably reach out, saying, “I should probably ping him,” and then saying he would not want to “pick a fight with anybody.”